Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to you both.
Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve shout out.
TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists" used to obsess over.
From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we delegated our energy consumption by moving our mfg overseas.
FWIW: Omitting Pueyo's tangent about the Henry Adams Curve, I found this article to be a great overview of solar PV's current position on its cost-learning-curve.
And I agree the cost of solar PV will decrease for some time. Even faster than the most optimistic projections, which has been the norm for years.
Exciting times.
I look forward to Pueyo's article explaining why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs. Transmission? Utility monopolies? Financing?
> why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs.
That's economics 201. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. So it doesn't matter how cheap some producers are, the price of a commodity is set by the most expensive producer that is meeting demand. So price of electricity won't drop until cheap producers can meet 100% of demand.
Until that happens, cheap producers enjoy outsized profits, encouraging more cheap producers to join the market.
Makes sense, and then you can split consumption (or production - arbitraging with a battery) into time-of-use buckets (a kWh of electricity already has different costs if you're buying during peak hours vs off-peak vs super-off-peak), or spot prices vs reserve prices. In commodities terms, I feel like it would be similar to futures and spot-price.
Those who can buy their energy in bulk and store it efficiently, or only consume when the price is lower than X, will pay a lower rate than those who cannot store energy, or who pay to have someone else store it (again, arbitrage)
Another issue is that ocean water becomes very usable since it becomes so cheap to remove the salt from it. It won't be long before the most productive food producers will be in desert regions that have access to the sea (like Australia, Pakistan and Saudia Arabia).
well, given that the solar luminosity is 3.8 × 10²⁶ watts, the milky way galaxy contains about 2 × 10¹¹ stars, of which ¾ are red dwarfs and so about 5 × 10¹⁰ are sunlike stars, probably our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will use about 2 × 10³⁵ watts. current world marketed energy consumption is about 19 terawatts (1.9 × 10¹³ watts) so that's about 10²²× more than at present, not 4× or 6×
unless the humans die out as yet another sad single-planet species
The classic mistake with calculations around this topic is assuming you need an equal amount of electric energy to displace the equivalent in fossil fuel. It's a broken assumption that you see popping up in a lot of places. Including reports by institutions that should know better like the IEA.
A classic example here is cars. A typical Tesla would have about 65kwh of usable battery. A gallon of fuel represents about 31 kwh. So, a 1 to 1 replacement would mean that Tesla would have about 8x less range than it actually has compared to a car with e.g. a 15 gallon tank and. pretty decent mileage of 16 miles to the gallon. Reason: a Tesla manages about 4-5 miles per kwh which amounts to about 250-300 miles range. Let's low ball that to 250. Meaning, you can drive about 8 cars more per kwh of electricity than per kwh of ICE car. Switching all road traffic to electric would mean we actually save a lot of energy. Maybe not 8x but it's going to be substantially less than what we currently consume in fuel for road traffic.
People underestimate how quickly this is going. Most commercial fleets are switching sooner rather than later. They have to, the cost savings are to large to ignore. That's most of the traffic on roads and it's not going to take decades.
Heating and cooling with heat pumps is the similar. A good heat pump that is installed properly should deliver a COP of about 4. Meaning you get 4 units of heat (or cooling) for every kwh you put in. A gas heater has a COP of slightly below 1. 1 is it's theoretical maximum. So switching industrial and domestic heating/cooling over to heat pumps is going to deliver some pretty significant savings as well. Mostly industries have barely scratched the surface on this topic. Industrial heating is mostly still based on burning gas or other fossil fuels. That's because gas used to be cheap and electricity used to be expensive.
Now that that cost has flipped around, companies are slow to adapt. But eventually some companies will start figuring this out and once they do it might save them a lot of money and make them a lot more competitive. And all that is before you consider using cheap off peak electricity when wholesale energy prices occasionally go negative!
4x-5x overall more electricity usage sounds about right. I expect it to be more because as energy keeps on getting cheaper we'll keep on finding new uses for it as energy prices keep on dropping. Assuming everything stays the same is not a great way to make predictions about the future. Things rarely do. But it's not that unreasonable to assume a 5x increase to happen over the next few decades. But it will cost us a lot less than our current energy spending. If we keep on going at the pace we are currently going we'll get there easily. And there are good reasons to expect things to speed up actually.
Solar cost will keep on shrinking. Especially in the US there is a lot of potential for improvements. That's because cost is currently inflated due to a combination of import tariffs and asinine regulations that mean installation cost is insanely high compared to other countries. Some of that regulation is courtesy of fossil fuel companies lobbying for this. But both are fixable problems. And more importantly, both are non technical problems. Meaning that international competition between countries (and domestically between states) will force the issue ultimately.
Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity.
Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc.
Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?